Monday, 10 December 2012

A Dorm of Their Own [for Cambodian underprivileged female students]

Alan
Lightman is the rare professor who has published on relativistic
plasmas and also has a book deal with Pantheon. A professor of the
practice of the humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Lightman is a trained astrophysicist who has published six novels –
including the New York Times bestseller Einstein’s Dreams
– a book of poetry, and more than 10 nonfiction books, ranging from
essay collections to popular science to physics textbooks. His most
recent book, Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, was published in January; his essay, “Our Place in the Universe,” is featured in the latest issue of Harper’s.

It would be enough to keep most people busy. But for the better part
of the last decade, Lightman has devoted half his time to humanitarian
work. He is the founding director of the Harpswell Foundation, which
seeks to expand access to higher education and provide leadership
training to talented young women in Cambodia.

“It was partly accidental and partly not accidental,” the 64-year-old
Lightman says of how the foundation got started. “I knew that I wanted
to do some humanitarian work later in life, but this happened sooner
than I was planning.”

It happened, Lightman says, when he
and his daughter, Elyse, traveled to Cambodia in December 2003. While
there, Lightman met a woman who told him that when she was attending
university in the mid-'90s in the capital city of Phnom Penh, she and
six other female students slept in the six-foot-deep crawl space beneath
a university building. (In Cambodia, buildings are elevated on stilts
because of the monsoons.)

Lightman was struck by the woman’s courage and her commitment to
getting a higher education. And he became aware of an underlying
problem: while most of Cambodia’s universities are in Phnom Penh, only
10 percent of the country’s population lives there. The universities do
not provide housing.

“If you’re a woman living in the countryside, no matter how smart you
are, if you don’t have a place to live in Phnom Penh, you’re out of
luck,” says Lightman. He explains that while men can live in Buddhist
pagodas while pursuing a college education, this option is not open for
women. Furthermore, he says, even if a woman’s family can afford to rent
her an apartment in Phnom Penh, concerns about safety often preclude
them from doing so.

All this is in the context of the fact that Cambodia lost much of its
educated population in the 1970s during the Khmer Rouge genocide. “It’s
a country that’s without an educated elite, so for someone who’s in the
education business, like me, it is a very, very powerful challenge: how
do you help a country get back on its feet?” Lightman asks.

The Harpswell Foundationopened its
first dormitory and leadership center for women in Phnom Penh in 2006
and the second in 2009. Together, the dormitories house 80 women, who
come from all over the country. All were among the top four female
students in their high schools. Most come from very poor families. “The
profile of a typical student is that her parents are farmers -- some
only have one parent -- she has four or five siblings, she lives in a
one-room house with no electricity and no plumbing and she’s never been
to a doctor in her life,” Lightman says.

The women are enrolled at any one of Phnom Penh’s universities, and
study a wide variety of fields including biology, engineering, English,
finance, Khmer literature, law, medicine and pharmacy. In addition to
their university coursework, students take Harpswell’s supplemental
curriculum, which emphasizes critical thinking and analysis, public
speaking and English. Each week, students must take three hours of
English language instruction and participate in two hourlong discussions
of current events. (The latter are called Cambodia Daily
discussions, as students use the local newspaper as their text.)
Students also participate in required leadership seminars two Sundays
each month: on one Sunday they study Cambodian history – “every leader
needs to know the history of their own country,” Lightman says – and on
the other they examine case studies of great female leaders.

“We want to inspire them,” says Varony Ing, the senior manager of the
foundation. “How can they become great woman who can contribute to and
share their knowledge with their own country and the world?”

“Harpswell is like a family to me. It is also a place that changed my
life,” says Savada Prom, president of the Harpswell Alumnae Association
and a member of the first Harpswell class, which moved into the
original dormitory in 2006. Prom, who graduated from the Royal
University of Law and Economics, now works at a law firm in Phnom Penh
and hopes to complete her master of laws degree overseas before sitting
for Cambodia’s bar exam. She hopes eventually to work in the country’s
Ministry of Justice.

Prom comes from the Siem Reap province in the north of the country –
where the Temple of Angkor Wat and the tourists are – about a 6-hour bus
ride from the capital. Coming to Phnom Penh, meeting smart girls from
around the country, “it made me see that there is a bigger world that I
can obtain,” she says.

“As a girl, I thought maybe I could be a bank teller, but I had no idea that I could be a lawyer.”

A dollar goes a long way in Cambodia. Lightman says
the foundation’s annual budget is around $215,000. Of this, $175,000
funds all operations in Cambodia, including room and board for 80
students, salaries for five staff members, maintenance of the two dorms,
a 24-hour security guard for each dorm, computers (there are 20), and
even tuition scholarships for those students who don’t receive
scholarships from the government or their university (about a third of
Harpswell’s students). The Cambodia budget also funds an elementary
school Harpswell built in the Muslim village of Tramung Chrum.

The other $40,000 is used for American operations, including
Lightman's travel to Cambodia (two trips per year) and support for
select Harpswell students to spend a year in the United States. Lightman
has personally arranged fellowships and in-kind support for students to
spend a year at Agnes Scott College, Bard College, Bowdoin College,
Northeastern University, or the School for International Training after
they graduate from their Cambodian institutions.

Five Harpswell students are currently on fellowships in the U.S.,
including Rada Chhorn, who studied psychology at the Royal University of
Phnom Penh and is taking courses on gender and sexuality studies at
Bowdoin. She hopes when she returns to Cambodia to work in the Ministry
of Women’s Affairs or a nongovernmental women’s rights organization.

The students who receive fellowships to study in the U.S. must sign a
commitment that they will return to work in Cambodia for at least three
years. The first year the foundation sent students here, in 2010, it
didn’t require such a commitment and two of the five stayed behind and
married Americans. “That really crushed me,” Lightman says. “After
putting so many resources into each of these students, and then to have
them come to the U.S. and stay here … it completely defeats our
mission.”

“Our goal is that 20 years from now, our Harpswell graduates will be
cabinet ministers, they will be heads of hospitals, they will be heads
of law firms, they will be heads of NGOs, they will be entrepreneurs,”
says Lightman.

“If we succeed only in helping the particular women that go to our
program, and that’s all we help, then I feel like we’re not achieving
our goal. Our goal is to help Cambodia. We view these women as agents of
change.”

“A leader is not someone who’s just helping themselves. They are
helping a community and in this case, we’re hoping, an entire country.”

No comments:

Between Tea Banh and Hun Sen, who would you support? គាំទ្រ ហ៊ុន សែន ឬ ទា បាញ់?

Between Hun Sen and Sok An, who would you support? គាំទ្រ ហ៊ុន​ សែន ឬ សុខ អាន?

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